RE: MVC/XML Framework Comments please

[elephantwalker]

Title: MVC/XML Framework Comments please

Vic,

 

You've made so many early decisions that make any later decisions fait accompli. But here goes my comments.

 

The most significant issue you can have is performance and portability. That is, can you easily make changes without breaking the system. As for performance, will the system scale just by adding servers?

 

The xml/xsl/html view methodology is pretty well done by Cocoon. But you performance may suffer. For example, how can this take advantage of any caching technology, other than what's built into Cocoon? The jsp/servlet filter model provide a much richer way to use xml/xsl transformations to html...and you can easily cache pseudo-static content with various third-party caching tags in the jsp. None of the frameworks you mention take advantage of filters or jsp tags (well Struts has tags). By the way, just because it's a servlet or jsp doesn't mean you are generating views with html, we generate xml with the jsp's or servlets, and filters to generate the html.

 

As for using jdbc directly from java beans...That's just about neanderthal technology now. We don't need no stinking sql code (just kidding), but cmp in ejb's is primetime, now. Any framework that makes use of backend "business methods" and not sql code should be much more "un-breakable" and portable the using beans and sql. Then you have the performance issues. You can use stateless session beans to abstract the client from the entity bean, and this gives "extreme" performance over using an a bean with jdbc/sql calls. You can use a bean for your model...but the bean should actually be using a stateless session bean to get the data.

 

As for the controller, the most scalable thing I have seen is using a servelet/session bean as the controller. The servelet registers the various events by reading an xml config file, and then cranks up the session bean with the various event handlers. Each handler can control the model data as described above with business methods.

 

Are your specific question: jcorporate...way over the top on the price, forget about these guys. You can get better results with opensymphony or doing it yourself.

 

Jetspeed uses Cocoon as its underlying technology. So this means you presistance is a hack compared to what you can do with ejb's. But if you have a lot of relatively "fixed" content that does'nt really change much, this could be your best choice.

 

regards,

 

 

The elephantwalker

 

 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Vic Cekvenich
Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2001 11:53 AM
To: Orion-Interest
Subject: MVC/XML Framework Comments please

We are bout to pick a a framework, and I am looking for are comments or
recommendation on a frameworks, other than Struts. (Don't want to be
HTML/JSP centric) Any feedback on your experience with a framework, or do
you know of web sites in production that are using a certain frame work, or
do you know of friend or someone who has used one.

I would like it to be XML centric, and MVC. For example, the V should apply
the XSL to XML, to make it HTML. It should do standard session tracking. It
should do standard data manager, so that Java Beans do the SQL (the M). A
minor plus is form entry management and a bit of image/content management.
It should be a single rich framework. Here are a few we are considering:

http://www.jcorporate.com/html/products/productsfm.html

http://jakarta.apache.org/jetspeed/site/index.html

and all the ones under Jakarta.

We need to pick one soon. Any comments and feedback welcome on
frameworks/class libraries.

Thanks, [EMAIL PROTECTED]